The second day of the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami was as colourful as we’ve come to expect, with PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, one of the conference’s keynote speakers, walking to the conference’s main Nakamoto stage and beginning his address by throwing a wad of $100 bills into the audience in an attempt to highlight the difference between crypto and government-backed fiat currency.
“I thought you guys were supposed to be Bitcoin maximalists,” Thiel remarked as the crowd rushed for the cash.
He then made an energised pro-Bitcoin speech, predicting that Bitcoin’s price would rise 100-fold from its current level and that traditional financial markets would eventually collapse.
“The central banks are going bankrupt. We are at the end of the fiat money regime.”
Thiel also revealed his “enemies list,” in which he named Warren Buffett, the famed Berkshire Hathaway investor, as “Enemy No. 1.” Thiel described Buffett as a “sociopathic grandpa,” implying that he disagreed with the Berkshire Hathaway CEO’s anti-Bitcoin remarks.
Thiel also named JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Blackrock CEO Larry Fink to his list of billionaires, accusing them of conducting a “gerontocracy”—a society dominated by the elderly—against Bitcoin.
Later in the day, Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas used his 15 minutes on the main stage to take aim at bonds, announcing that Bitcoin now accounts for 60% of his total liquid investment portfolio, up from 10% in December 2020.
“I definitely don’t have any bonds […] I have 60% in Bitcoin and Bitcoin equities, and then 40% in hard asset stocks like oil and gas and gold miners, and that’s where I am. “
